Dev.D with Twilight Players

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About this drawing

I watched the Anurag Kashyap movie Dev.D in Feb-09 and was very inspired by it — which led me to do this drawing. The movie is a modern "retelling" of the Devdas story, and is very stylishly done. It has Abhay Deol in the title role. Dev is portrayed as a rich, aimless character who takes to a path of self-destruction after losing his sweetheart Paro (Mahie Gill). A large part of the movie depicts Dev drinking, snorting cocaine, and tripping out to the various substances in his system — taking time to stop off in a brothel where he forms a relationship with Chanda (Kalki Koechlin). I loved the way the whole movie was put together, the visuals and songs (this is a musical so there are some 18 songs on the soundtrack, a highlight of which is "Emosanal Atyachar") were great. This comes from director Anurag Kashyap who made the excellent and very different No Smoking. The beautiful photography of Dev.D (Rajeev Ravi) deserves to be seen on a big screen, and I will definitely be picking up the DVD of this movie when it comes out (I hope it'll have a good bunch of special features). Anurag Kashyap's next movie Gulaal was released a month or so after this, and I hear that is also excellent.

The drawing is a simple one — it has a close up of Abhay Deol as Dev.D in one of the "tripping out" sequences, and below, are the Twilight Players (a group who perform dances on two of the songs on the soundtrack — "Pardesi" and "Saali Khushi"). It was done in pencil and later coloured on computer.